The Strange Order of Things ─ Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures

From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection on the origins of life, mind, and culture that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding life, culture, and feeling.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of regulating life within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other life-forms; and that inherent in the very chemistry of life is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. The Strange Order of Things offers us a new way of understanding the world and our place in it.

Antonio Damasio is University Professor, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, and consciousness. His work on the role of affect in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and has been named “Highly Cited Researcher” by the Institute for Scientific Information, and is regarded as one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era.

Damasio is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has received numerous prizes, among them the Grawemeyer Award [2014] and the Honda Prize [2010], the Asturias Prize in Science and Technology [2005], and the Nonino [2003], Signoret [2004] and Pessoa [1992] Prizes.

He holds Honorary Doctorates from several leading Universities, some shared with his wife Hanna, e.g. the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne [EPFL], 2011 and the Sorbonne [Université Paris Descartes], 2015.

Damasio has discussed his research and ideas in several books, among them Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens, Looking for Spinoza and Self Comes to Mind, which are translated and taught in universities worldwide.

(For more information go to the Brain and Creativity Institute website at http://www.usc.edu/bci/).